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‘And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at 05:00 today.’

I am in Central London. It’s 4.30 a.m. and the sun is beginning to rise on England’s capital city. The sky is streaked with long red wisps of orange and red on a canvas of pale blue sky. Heavy grey smudges of rain hang across the horizon, dropping midsummer rain. Flocks of green parakeets dance from tree to tree in Regent’s Park as I head towards Portland Place and one of the most iconic components of our establishment, the BBC.

I have worked for the BBC for nearly two decades and many of its programmes are rightly considered national treasures: The Archers, Blue Peter, Desert Island Discs … but for me it has always been the Shipping Forecast, the five-minute weather update for mariners, that symbolizes all that is great about this institution.

I can remember as a child hearing the forecast, marvelling at the often alien-sounding names and wondering what it all meant. The curious mix of words: Viking, Dogger, German Bight. They were so strange and exotic and mysterious. I was enthralled, and that fascination has lasted a lifetime – at home I still have a large map on which each area is labelled and marked off.

I have visited all of the regions; I have experienced the best and the worst of the weather, on land and at sea. But I had never visited the home of the Shipping Forecast … until now.

Chris Aldridge, the senior announcer at BBC Radio 4, invited me to sit in one morning. And so it was that, long before London had woken, I found myself journeying across the deserted city to Broadcasting House. Chris has been reading the shipping forecast for over twenty years and calculates that he has intoned the names of the familiar locations over three thousand times.

Broadcasting House was deserted except for a couple of security guards in the lobby. ‘Hi Ben,’ grinned Chris as he ushered me up through the doors. ‘Sorry about the early start.’ Up on the fourth floor, the Today programme office was a hive of activity as they prepared for their Monday morning show. Justin Webb and Sarah Montague sat in silence in the middle of the office preparing their scripts,

‘Morning.’ I smiled, trying to look cool and unflappable. ‘Nice weather!’ I added. What was I doing talking about the weather with the country’s premier news presenters? The Radio 4 Today programme is another BBC institution and I was a little in awe.

‘Here we go,’ said Chris, settling me into the small studio, where a bank of televisions were broadcasting various news channels. In the middle was a huge digital clock. It read 5.13 a.m.

‘This is Matt, our producer,’ he introduced me. ‘And this is Stav.’ Stavros Danaos, one of the BBC’s weather forecasters, sat at the microphone clutching his notes and the all-important forecast.

5.20. ‘A minute to broadcast,’ announced Matt through the headphones.

Stav cleared his throat as Chris introduced the Shipping Forecast.

There is not one individual who is the voice of the Shipping Forecast. I knew that there must be more than one because I had heard both male and female presenters reading the forecast, but I was surprised to hear that there are as many as twenty who rotate.

The complexities of the data to non-mariners mean that new presenters must take a special Shipping Forecast course to learn the significance of each piece of information, ensuring the correct intonation. ‘You must learn not to say “Gale 8” with a rising intonation on the 8,’ explained Chris as Stav prepared to deliver his missive to mariners across the British Isles, ‘On the Beaufort Scale, 8 is a gale, therefore it’s important not to read it with a raised intonation, but to lift the 9 afterwards.’

Stav’s smooth voice delivered the information with confidence and authority. It was strange hearing it produced in such neutral surroundings, given all the years of listening to it while being buffeted by gales.

And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 0505 UTC* on Monday 3rd July 2017.

There are warnings of gales in Trafalgar.

The general synopsis at midnight:

High Scandinavia 1038, expected Norwegian Sea 1036 by 0600 tomorrow. Low 200 miles west of Sole 994 expected Fitzroy 1001 by same time.

The area forecasts for the next 24 hours:

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: Variable 3 or 4. Slight, occasionally moderate. Fair. Good.

South Forties: Easterly or northeasterly 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.

North Forties, Cromarty: Easterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 in south. Moderate, occasionally rough. Showers. Good.

Forth, Tyne, Dogger: East or northeast 5 or 6. Moderate. Showers. Good.

Fisher: Northeast 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.

German Bight, Humber: Northeast 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.

Thames, Dover: Mainly east or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate. Showers. Moderate or good.

Wight, Portland: East 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.

Plymouth: East or southeast 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.

Biscay: Southeast backing east 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain or showers. Mainly good.

South Fitzroy: Southerly at first in east, otherwise westerly becoming cyclonic later, 5 or 6. Moderate or rough, becoming rough or very rough. Occasional rain or thundery showers. Good, occasionally poor.

North Fitzroy, Sole: Southeasterly backing easterly 6 to gale 8, occasionally severe gale 9, becoming cyclonic 5 or 6 for a time in west. Rough or very rough, occasionally high later. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

Lundy, Fastnet: Southeast backing east 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.

Irish Sea: East or northeast 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.

Shannon: Southeast 7 to severe gale 9, backing east 5 to 7. Rough or very rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

Southwest Rockall: Southeasterly 5 to 7. Rough or very rough. Fair. Good.

Northeast Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: Southeasterly 5 or 6. Moderate or rough. Fair. Good.

Fair Isle: Easterly or southeasterly 3 or 4, occasionally 5 in southwest. Slight or moderate. Fair. Good.

Faeroes: South or southeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate, becoming moderate or rough later. Mainly fair. Good.

Southeast Iceland: Southerly or southeasterly 5 or 6. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain, mainly in west, fog patches at first. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor at first.

Once Stav had finished, Matt’s voice came through the headphones, ‘Listen to this,’ and with the click of a button, the clean, clear forecast became slightly distorted with the crackle of interference. ‘You’re hearing it through a shortwave transistor radio we have hidden in the depths of the BBC,’ he explained. ‘We use it to ensure we are still broadcasting and to check what the listeners are hearing.’

I loved the idea that a tiny old-fashioned radio, gathering cobwebs somewhere in a largely forgotten office, was still in use while the rest of the building hummed with the latest in broadcasting equipment.

Even though most modern ships have on-board technology that gives the same information, even though much of the listening audience has no need of maritime weather bulletins, the Shipping Forecast retains its unique, otherworldly authority no matter which BBC reader intones the strict 370-word summary. It’s also a pointer to many of our seafaring traditions and accomplishments. Take the Beaufort Scale as an example – another of England’s meteorological gifts to the world, born from our rich weather patterns and unique maritime heritage.

The scale was devised in 1805 by Francis Beaufort, a Royal Navy officer on HMS Woolwich. Measurements of wind speed at the time were highly subjective, so the reports were unreliable. Beaufort devised a way of standardizing the strength of the wind, at first simply in terms of its effects on the sails of the Royal Navy’s frigates: from ‘just sufficient to give steerage’ to ‘that which no canvas sails could withstand’. As steam power arrived, the scale was changed to reflect the prevailing sea conditions rather than the effect on the fast-disappearing sails. In 1946, tropical cyclones – forces 13–17 – were added to the scale.

The shipping forecast itself can be traced back to 1853, when Captain Robert Fitzroy – the captain of HMS Beagle, made famous by Charles Darwin – was tasked with finding a way to predict the weather in order to reduce the growing number of Royal Navy and trading vessels lost around Britain’s coast. He set up fifteen weather stations around the coastline which together started to provide a version of the weather forecast by 1861. In 1911 the information was sent in Morse code to ships and then, sixty years after those fifteen weather stations were set up, in 1921, it was broadcast on the radio, marking the birth of the Shipping Forecast.

Fitzroy’s original weather stations were based on locations and geographical features. North and South Utsire, Wight, Lundy, Fastnet, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland were all named after islands, many of which I have been to – including the notoriously stormy Rockall, which true to form was lashed by gales. I still feel sick just thinking about it. German Bight was formerly known as Heligoland, an island that once belonged to Britain before we swapped it and the Caprivi Strip – a small protrusion of land in Namibia – with the Germans in exchange for Zanzibar.

Forties, Dogger, Sole and Bailey were named after sandbanks, while Thames, Humber, Shannon, Cromarty and Forth carried the names of rivers. Dover and Portland were called after the respective towns. Biscay and Irish Sea are named after, well, seas. Finally, Finisterre, Trafalgar and Malin are all headlands.

Perhaps the biggest controversy to hit the Shipping Forecast came in 2002 when the Met Office agreed to change the name of Finisterre to Fitzroy, after the forecast’s founder. Finisterre is also used by the Spanish meteorological office in its shipping forecast to refer to a different, much smaller area.

So controversial was the decision that the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation (can you believe such a thing actually exists?) was called to adjudicate. They ruled that the name change was unlawful. The British press were furious that another nation would meddle in our shipping affairs, and the name stuck.

As an island and a seafaring nation, we are particularly proud of our coast and the waters that surround us. The weather and the oceans have played a pivotal role in our history and lives. And the people who work the waters and the coastline – like fishermen and lighthouse keepers – have always struck me as playing a rich and important part in our national identity.

My own relationship with the ocean goes deep. Despite my central London roots I have spent a great deal of time on or next to the ocean, from a year marooned on a deserted island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides to several months rowing across the Atlantic, not to mention a spell flirting with joining the Royal Navy when I was a student. A keen sailor, I have also spent many years aboard yachts all around the English coastline.

While studying at Portsmouth University on the south coast I enrolled in the University Royal Naval Unit. I was enthralled by naval history and would often disappear into another world as we held formal dinners below deck on HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour. The Royal Navy and Portsmouth were steeped in a rich and tangible maritime history. I became a midshipman officer aboard HMS Blazer, a small grey P200 Fast Patrol Boat into which we somehow managed to cram nearly a dozen people per voyage.

It was a baptism of fire for a lazy university student. I would spend my week drinking, sleeping and generally missing lectures, and weekends washing the heads (toilets) with a toothbrush and being shouted at by higher ranks. HMS Blazer’s permanent crew were technically lower ranking than us, but we all knew where the authority lay and the regular sailors took great pride in making life as much of a misery as possible.

Truth be told, I loved the regimen of life aboard a naval vessel. In spite of the storms and the language and the discipline and the sleepless night shifts and the impossible navigation, there was something rather marvellous and English about the Navy. We took our small grey war vessel on foreign deployments as far afield as Norway and Gibraltar, where we would often host foreign powers’ First Sea Lords. I wondered frequently whether they ever realized we were mere university students dressed in our finest officers’ jackets. I shall never forget my time in Dartmouth at the Royal Britannia Naval College. It still gives me tremendous pride that I played a tiny part in our rich naval heritage.

Throughout all of these maritime experiences, there has been one constant: the Shipping Forecast. I have listened to the Shipping Forecast in most of the regions included in the report. I have been on fishing trawlers, naval warships, yachts and remote islands, listening in to London. Often, the contrast between the conditions in the sea areas referred to and the calm of the BBC studio in which the report is read could not be more marked. There was always something reassuring about the smooth tones of the BBC reader’s voice as it crackled through the ship’s radio delivering the update from the Met Office, but I often wondered whether the reader had any idea under what conditions the words were being listened to.

While I endured gales, rain and storms, I would imagine the calmness of London. The way the reader announced storm force winds without a hint of worry or drama was always a comfort. The report was utterly literal. Fact. No hype or drama. No jeopardy – that was hidden within the forecast in the numbers of the Beaufort Scale. You never wanted to hear of anything above a 10. The Shipping Forecast above all had the ability to transport me to a different place, more often than not a slightly nicer, calmer one.

There is a school of thought that the Shipping Forecast is much more than purely weather information. Some consider it poetry; others a national anthem of sorts. However you see it – and poets, musicians, rock bands, comedians, film makers, video game designers continue to draw inspiration from it – the BBC broadcast attracts hundreds of thousands of daily listeners who have no technical need to know their Dogger from their Lundy.

It is treasured just as it is – from its idiosyncratic vocabulary, whereby winds are either veering (changing clockwise) or backing (changing anti-clockwise), to its sense that there is, beyond the individual stresses and concerns we might ponder as we lie tucked up cosily in bed, a truly wild maritime world out there. Some fans go as far as to describe it as an adult lullaby, a soporific comfort that helps them nod off at the end of a long day. There is no doubt that it has evolved into a quirky but much-loved national institution, as intrinsic as the Houses of Parliament or fish and chips.

In the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, the Shipping Forecast was played with the accompaniment of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ to represent Britain’s maritime heritage. Such is its popularity, the BBC iPlayer website retains a collection of humorous and lyrical clips, even a quiz. It’s been read by playwright Alan Bennett. Its form and formulaic language have been borrowed to create a rap version called ‘Snoop Doggy Dogger’ and applied satirically to the world of politics and sport. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians and even politicians have lined up to both satirize and pay tribute to its distinctive tones: these include Seamus Heaney, Blur, Stephen Fry, Frank Muir, Radiohead, British Sea Power and Carol Ann Duffy. And there have been a few celebrity readings, such as that by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who read the forecast in 2011 to raise awareness of Red Nose Day. When it came to his native Humber, he deliberately dropped the ‘H’ and said: ‘’Umber, as we say it up there.’ Once, in 1995, a plan was mooted to move the late-night broadcast back by twelve minutes – prompting a fierce debate in Parliament and fierce newspaper outrage. The Shipping Forecast remained anchored in the schedule at 0048. Everyone, it seems, loves the Shipping Forecast.

How can I sum up the forecast’s appeal to those who don’t technically need it? Mark Damazer, the Controller of BBC Radio 4, nails it: ‘It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.’

Zeb Soanes, a regular Shipping Forecast reader, who once fulfilled a listener’s wish by delivering the forecast from the top of Orfordness lighthouse, touches on its emotional pull: ‘To the non-nautical, it is a nightly litany of the sea. It reinforces a sense of being islanders with a proud seafaring past. Whilst the listener is safely tucked up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing boats bobbing about at Plymouth or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall.’

The purpose of the Shipping Forecast is to warn against the hazards of hostile weather. And as such it taps into an ancient impulse. Throughout history, the English have scanned the horizon along the country’s 2,748 miles of coastline on the lookout for perils. We can call upon Shakespeare to express in the most lyrical terms how geography – a sense of place and its attendant climate – makes a people who they are. John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II beautifully crystallizes the English view of their ‘sceptre’d isle’:

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world;

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house.

There hasn’t been a successful invasion of our shores since 1066 – for 950 years – but still we keep an eye out to guard against threats. These are much more likely to be incoming weather formations than armadas or invading fleets. Our island existence depends on keeping a watchful eye over our waters. The Shipping Forecast subliminally reassures us that someone is doing that.

The English language is full of vocabulary, phrases and idioms that reveal its people come from maritime stock. For example: the Romans arrived in AD 53, and stayed not just as imperial administrators, but also as traders and tellers of stories of the Christian ‘cult’ of Jesus alongside their pagan deities. A few centuries later, when Christianity had become established, the main body of the churches built all over the country at the centre of communities became known as the nave, from the Latin for ship, navis. The name came as a natural transfer of associated ideas. Like ships that introduced the religion, naves contain a body of people.

Until mass air travel became the norm in the late 1950s, and the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, marine transport was the only way for anyone to reach the English or for the English to reach the rest of Europe and the world. That’s why maritime trade and the Royal Navy have always had such great importance. We send boats and ships out on missions (naval, commercial, leisure) and receive incoming vessels only by invitation or by arrangement with the harbourmaster.

And as a nation, we spend a lot of time out on the water. In fine weather there’s nothing the English like more than pootling around in a dinghy or on a raft, feeling the sea air on their face on a bracing coastal walk, or enjoying a bucket and spade holiday on a stretch of sand. To live in a cottage by the sea has long been a dream of those approaching retirement. The fashion for affordable package holidays by the seaside was consolidated when Billy Butlin established a chain of hotels at locations such as Bognor, Blackpool, Skegness, Barry Island, Ayr and Clacton. Our top-rated chefs prize seaweed as ‘sea herbs’ and fight to stop all our hand picking of our own supplies. As no one lives more than a hundred miles from the coastline and many rivers have tidal reaches, the screech of seagulls is as familiar as the siren call of the fair-weather ice cream van. The hinterland behind the coastline is dotted with woods, hollows and tunnels romantically suspected to have once served as hiding places for smugglers’ contraband. Nautical novels are noted bestsellers, from C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books to Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-volume Aubrey–Maturin series of novels, set in the early nineteenth century and following the lives and careers of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval physician Dr Stephen Maturin.

So many quintessentially English passions are built on sea-based stories, from the rock music popularized by pirate radio in the 1960s – broadcast from offshore ships or disused sea forts, providing music for a generation not yet served by legal radio services – to the notion of an ocean cruise as the dream once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Personal challenges and stories revolve around the sea too: to swim the English Channel, to row across the Atlantic, to circumnavigate the British Isles. We are bound to the sea in a way that infuses our whole national mindset.

Take the fast-food dish we gave to the world: fish and chips. Piping hot fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, doused in salt and vinegar, is what foreigners think we eat outside as a comfort on cold and wintry days. And even today, with the invasion of fast food from America and elsewhere, it is estimated there are still eight fish and chip shops for every McDonald’s.

Finally, it is impossible to document our English maritime heritage without mention of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. As a child I can remember my pride in raising money for the iconic RNLI. I had one of their famous lifeboat donation tins, which I used to fill over the course of the year. It is almost impossible to visit any beach or coastal village in England without seeing the famous RNLI flag, although I’m sure few of us notice it, because it’s so familiar.

The RNLI has saved more than 140,000 lives since 1824. Today it is staffed almost exclusively by 4,600 volunteers – who provide search and rescue at sea as well as lifeguard cover at over 150 English beaches. Their work is invaluable in sustaining our proud island nation status.

Back at Broadcasting House, Chris explains why he thinks the Shipping Forecast is so popular. ‘Many of the names are unfamiliar to people apart from the context of the Shipping Forecast, so it turns our landscape into a slightly ethereal world, inhabited by communities we are connected to but know nothing about. It’s something that binds us together when so much divides us.’

I’m struck by how true this is. The Shipping Forecast is many things to many people – essential information, a lullaby to send them to sleep, a poem, a song, a comfort in times of stress or danger at sea. Perhaps above all, though, it reminds us who we are: an island people in the Atlantic who naturally, instinctively, look to sea.

* UTC stands for Universal Co-ordinated Time – the new international term for GMT.